As an historian Kimberley Phillips enjoys the tools of her trade.
“I love research,” said Phillips, dean, since August, of Brooklyn College’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. “There is something tremendous about piecing together the past, because it doesn’t always align in the way you think.
“It’s detective work, tremendously creative work, and its ethical. You have an obligation to get the story right, to take the time and hear the complicated stories. So you have to become well versed in a number of other histories and chronologies.”
Phillips, 51, saw first hand how histories converge while writing her latest book, “War! What is it Good For? Black Freedom Struggles & the U.S. Military From World War II to Iraq” (2012, University of North Carolina Press).
Phillips was born into a military family — actually on a base in Missouri — and raised on bases across this country, Germany, and beyond.
Her father, Don Phillips, was an officer in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He and her mother, Myrtle, moved the family — she has three brothers, Don, Michael and Mark — as his orders came through — and during the Vietnam War years those orders came through often.
“Moving that much made me very curious,” she said. “You had to get to know a place very quickly — sometimes we stayed on a base for 10 months. So you if you didn’t get curious about where you are, you could leave before you walked out the door.
“So I became an ethnographer probably around the age of five or six. I learned to explore very quickly on foot and on bicycle.”
Those were the Vietnam War years, and Phillips said she had friends whose fathers were killed, long before people knew what was happening in there. “I knew what it meant for your dad to come home in the middle of the day. It meant he got orders.”
Orders meant either the family was leaving or Don Phillips, was being shipped out.
But being a military family didn’t keep her parents from making sure the Phillips children understood the realities of 1960’s America.
While living in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Phillips said her mother took her brood to pick strawberries in the fields so they could understand the plight of the farm workers who were trying to unionize.
For a time they lived in central California in a “radical Catholic community” of priests and nuns who were anti-war and working hard with migrant communities struggling for better work conditions.
“That community had a profound impact on my politics,” Phillips said. “There was such deep compassion. They were really living out the scripture that ‘whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers so you do unto me.'”
Phillips also recalled the racial contradictions of an America that asked African-American soldiers like her father to defend freedoms they were often denied at home.
“This is forever etched in my brain,” she said. “When I was not even 6-years old we were traveling (from Fort Benning, Ga.) across to Los Angeles, and we had to go this southern route because it was winter.
“My dad traveled in his uniform, and the kids had dog tags on in case something happened,” Phillips said. “We had to pack our food because we could not stop for food because we were black. My dad only drove at night.”
This was around the time Lemuel Penn, a black retired U.S. Army reservist and bronze star awardee, was shot to death while driving through Georgia.
“So I had the contradictions. My dad was off to Vietnam but he could not stop along the highway to get something to eat.”
Phillips attended the University of California at San Diego intent on being a marine biologist, but changed her major after she took a history class on a dare and found she loved it.
She would go on to earn a masters and doctorate degrees in American Studies from Yale University and teach at several universities. Phillips came to Brooklyn College after serving as a dean at the College of William and Mary, and writing two other books, “Daily Life: Black Migrations in the United States, 1865-1985” and “AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working Class Activism, Cleveland, 1915-1945.”
While researching her third book Phillips came across an oral history of the Vietnam War in which a soldier talked about landing there in 1968 and driving down a road that had been built by the 173rd Airborne Battalion.
She called her father, who retired from the military in 1988 and now lives near Tidewater, Va. She asked him where he had been in 1968.
“In Vietnam, building a road,” he said.
Phillips said she took the Brooklyn College dean post because it was an opportunity to come to “live with several things I value, public education with high values and aspirations and to work with a faculty that includes a number of people whose work I admire.
“This college is stunningly diverse and we’re a microcosm of what this nation should be. I love walking across this campus and hearing Creole, Hebrew, Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Ukraine.
“We really are global here.”
